Why do so many workplace and workforce ‘improvements’ backfire? Why do our people always seem like they’re on the brink of revolt, distracted and anxious?
In the technology-driven age of lean and agile, it’s humbling for management to admit that we too often fail to optimize the human element in work. We know that our teams will make or break a business, but we still struggle to truly engage them.

I recently had a fascinating conversation with my friend Dan Ariely about what really motivates teams…and how often we miss the mark. Because I’m a huge nerd for economics and behavioral psychology, I sent a cold email to Dan about three years ago, asking him a few questions, and we have been in touch since.

Autonomy, peer relationships, and parental conflict — these are the universal themes that made the popular 1990s comic Zits identifiable for anyone who has, or has been, a teenager. In one strip, hands in pockets and making a sullen sideways glance, Jeremy slouches next to his father. His t-shirt reads, “question authority.” Next to him, his equally chagrined father sports the t-shirt: “do not question my authority.” While his parents work to steer the 16-year-old in the right direction on his path to adulthood, Jeremy is equally determined to forge his own way. For the most part, their suggestions, pleas, and cajoles, don’t make it past his headphones.

Debunked conspiracy theories have been making the rounds on social media lately, from the thoroughly unsupported claim that millions of people voted illegally in California to false assertions about paid protesters being bused to demonstrations.

Conspiracy theories, which typically involve one or more powerful agents secretly manipulating world events, are accepted by a large proportion of Americans. One analysis of four nationally representative surveys found that half of respondents endorsed at least one conspiracy theory, such as the claim that Barack Obama was born outside the United States or that the financial crisis was deliberately orchestrated by a group of Wall Street bankers.

]]>http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/is-education-tied-to-conspiracy-theory-belief.html/feed0New Research From Clinical Psychological Sciencehttp://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/new-research-from-clinical-psychological-science-41.html
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/new-research-from-clinical-psychological-science-41.html#respondFri, 09 Dec 2016 05:01:57 +0000http://www.psychologicalscience.org/?p=128640More]]>Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science:

Metacognition refers to the beliefs we have about the way we think. People who have maladaptive metacognitive beliefs after experiencing a trauma have been found to have greater levels of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptomology. Researchers examined the role metacognitive belief plays in reactions to trauma over time by assessing participants for depression and anxiety, exposure to traumatic events, PTSD symptoms, trauma-related cognitions, and metacognitive beliefs about memory at two time points spaced 12 weeks apart. People who held negative metacognitive beliefs prior to experiencing a trauma were more likely to experience PTSD symptoms after experiencing a trauma. The researchers suggest that their results support the view that problematic metacognition impedes adaptation — and maintains PTSD symptoms — by encouraging a focus on threat and anxiety and a sense of danger.

Research has recently suggested that the large rates of comorbidity found in psychiatric disorders can be well explained by a model containing a general psychopathology factor p and specific externalizing and internalizing factors. Despite the growing popularity of this conceptualization, the stability of these factors — and their relatedness over time — has not been investigated. Adolescents and their parents provided reports about psychopathology and internalizing and externalizing symptoms (including anxiety, depression, and aggression) at two assessments 18 months apart. The researchers found a high degree of stability in psychopathology factors over time. Future research examining how psychopathology trajectories may be altered could provide important insights into treatments.

Does emotion regulation affect hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) functioning? Young adults completed diary entries and provided salivary cortisol samples six times a day for 3 consecutive weekdays. For each diary entry, participants reported their location, activities, and information about the most stressful situation they had encountered in the last hour, including their perceived level of stress and coping strategies they had used. The researchers found associations between different emotion regulation strategies and HPA functioning. For instance, the emotion regulation strategy of disengagement was associated with a steeper cortisol slope, and the emotion regulation strategy of problem solving was associated with greater cortisol upon awakening. These findings shed light on the impact of emotion regulation strategies on HPA functioning.

Everywhere you turn in American politics, leaders talk about the need for empathy. The best-known instance, of course, comes from Bill Clinton, who told an AIDS activist in 1992, “I feel your pain.” But it’s also been a recurrent theme in the career of Barack Obama, who declared in 2007 (while still a senator) that “the biggest deficit that we have in our society and in the world right now is an empathy deficit.”

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In a series of studies that I conducted with Yale graduate students Matthew Jordan and Dorsa Amir, just published in the journal Emotion, we compared people’s scores on two different scales, one measuring emotional empathy and another measuring compassion. As predicted, we found that the scales tap different aspects of our nature: You can be high in one and low in the other. We found as well that compassion predicts charitable donations, but empathy does not.

Here’s a move that pulls double duty: Next time you’re seated across from a potential new employer to hammer out salary details, try kicking things off with a silly wisecrack. One, it’ll break the ice; and two, it might just help you leave with a better offer. As the Association for Psychological Science explained in a recent blog post, past research has shown that opening with a joke about your desired salary can be a better strategy than playing it straight.

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“Knowledge of the candidate’s salary history gives the employer information about what the candidate is likely to expect, which may be at the lower end of what the employer is willing to offer,” said study author Todd J. Thorsteinson, a psychologist at the University of Idaho. (As the APS noted, Massachusetts recently become the first state to pass a law forbidding employers from asking about salary history, a big step in combating the gender wage gap.)

Katie Ledecky has been described as “an immense talent” but her own coach, Bruce Gemmell, has pointed out that Katie is “not a gifted athlete.” Whether the talent of Michael Phelps is a consequence of his genetically determined anatomy is a topic of perennial debate. And Usain Bolt recently referred to his “God-given talent” in the same interview in which he pointed out that “in Jamaica, we know we have to work hard. We do not get anything unless we work for it. My success is just a continuation of the great traditions left behind by past athletes.”

Talent. What are we to make of this word that people define in such different ways? If you close your eyes and think of the words you associate with talent, my guess is that you’ll generate a list like this: natural, God-given, gifted.

If you spent Thanksgiving trying in vain to convince relatives that the Pope didn’t really endorse Donald Trump or that Hillary Clinton didn’t sell weapons to ISIS, fake news has already weaseled its way into your brain.

Those “stories” and other falsified news outperformed much of the real news on Facebook before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And on Twitter, an analysis by University of Southern California computer scientists found that nearly 20 percent of election-related tweets came from bots, computer programs posing as real people and often spouting biased or fake news.

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And if you think only people on the opposite side of the political fence from you will fall for lies, think again. We all do it. Plenty of research shows that people are more likely to believe news if it confirms their preexisting political views, says cognitive scientist David Rapp of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. More surprising, though, are Rapp’s latest studies along with others on learning and memory. They show that when we read inaccurate information, we often remember it later as being true, even if we initially knew it was wrong. That misinformation can then bias us or affect our decisions.

]]>http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/youve-probably-been-tricked-by-fake-news-and-dont-know-it.html/feed0Illusion Reveals that the Brain Fills in Peripheral Visionhttp://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/illusion-reveals-that-the-brain-fills-in-peripheral-vision.html
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/illusion-reveals-that-the-brain-fills-in-peripheral-vision.html#respondThu, 08 Dec 2016 17:55:07 +0000http://www.psychologicalscience.org/?p=129213More]]>What we see in the periphery, just outside the direct focus of the eye, may sometimes be a visual illusion, according to new findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings suggest that even though our peripheral vision is less accurate and detailed than what we see in the center of the visual field, we may not notice a qualitative difference because our visual processing system actually fills in some of what we “see” in the periphery.

“Our findings show that, under the right circumstances, a large part of the periphery may become a visual illusion,” says psychology researcher Marte Otten from the University of Amsterdam, lead author on the new research. “This effect seems to hold for many basic visual features, indicating that this ‘filling in’ is a general, and fundamental, perceptual mechanism.”

As we go about daily life, we generally operate under the assumption that our perception of the world directly and accurately represents the outside world. But visual illusions of various kinds show us that this isn’t always the case. As the brain processes incoming information about an external stimulus, we come to learn, it creates a representation of the outside world that can diverge from reality in noticeable ways.

Otten and colleagues wondered whether this same process might explain why we usually feel as though our peripheral vision is detailed and robust when it isn’t.

“Perhaps our brain fills in what we see when the physical stimulus is not rich enough,” she explains. “The brain represents peripheral vision with less detail, and these representations degrade faster than central vision. Therefore, we expected that peripheral vision should be very susceptible to illusory visual experiences, for many stimuli and large parts of the visual field.”

Over a series of experiments, the researchers presented a total of 20 participants with a series of images. The participants focused on the center of the screen — a central image appeared and then a different peripheral image gradually faded in. Participants were supposed to click the mouse as soon as the difference between the central patch and the periphery disappeared and the entire screen appeared to be uniform.

Otten and colleagues changed the defining characteristic of the central image in different experiments, varying its shape, orientation, luminance, shade, or motion.

The results showed that all of these characteristics were vulnerable to a uniformity illusion – that is, participants incorrectly reported seeing a uniform image when the center and periphery were actually different.

The illusion was less likely to occur when the difference between the center and periphery was large; when the illusion did occur on these trials, it took longer to emerge.

Participants indicated that they felt roughly equally sure about their experience of uniformity when it actually did exist as when it was illusory. This suggests that the illusory experiences are similar to a visual experience based on a physical visual stimulus.

“The fun thing about this illusion is that you can to test this out for yourself,” Otten says. “If you look up the illusion on www.uniformillusion.com you can find out just how real the illusory experience feels for you.”

“The most surprising is that we found a new class of visual illusions with such a wide breadth, affecting many different types of stimuli and large parts of the visual field,” Otten adds. “We hope to use this illusion as a tool to uncover why peripheral vision seems so rich and detailed, and more generally, to understand how the brain creates our visual perceptual experiences.”

Co-authors on the research include Yair Pinto (University of Amsterdam, University of Sussex), Chris L.E. Paffen (Utrecht University), Anil K. Seth (University of Sussex), and Ryota Kanai (University of Sussex).

This research was supported by Intra-European Fellowships Marie Curie Grants No. 300184 to Y. Pinto and No. 329134 to M. Otten.

According to CDC’s “Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain,” there is little evidence of long-term benefits of opioids for managing chronic pain (i.e. pain lasting more than 3 months). But the CDC points to research showing that cognitive behavioral therapy, mental health counseling, or even a combination of these with nonopioid treatments (e.g. acetaminophen, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, physical therapy) as effective ways to decrease the risk of opioid co-dependence and potential death. These guidelines, along with the Surgeon General’s recent landmark report on substance use disorders, come at a time of growing concern over the alarmingly high rates of prescribed and illicit opioid abuse in the United States, often resulting in fatal overdoses.

The CDC and Surgeon General’s actions are a promising boost for clinical psychological scientists who help patients manage chronic pain. As APS reported in a November 2015 article in the Observer, psychological researchers have been piloting studies that involve interventions ranging from placebos to virtual-reality technology to leverage the power of perception to muffle pain.